Feb08

New Facebook Home Page

Above is a screenshot of the new Facebook home page. One change on the new page is showing all types of updates rather than just status updates.

Facebook has once again decided to redesign their home page. These types of changes usually result in millions of users joining groups titled "I hate the new design" or something similar.
Being a web designer I sympathize with Facebook.

One thing they changed with the recent redesign was removing the "status updates only" option on their home page. I'm now forced to sift through every group, fan page, image and application post
my friends have made. Facebook does give me the option to hide specific applications but with 1000's of apps out there, it isn't practical to hide each and every one. Enter Stylish.

Hacking Facebook's CSS

Using a Firefox addon called Stylish I was able to sift through Facebook's HTML & CSS and determine if they did a good job giving their home page elements proper class
names and IDs. For whatever reason Facebook uses custom HTML attributes. One of these was called data-ft. The first value in that attribute is a number that represents various home page types. The example below uses "46" which is plan ol'
vanilla status updates: